Thermal flashlight is a widely used technique to “paint temperature with light”: by using a temperature sensor and a RGB flashlight, it is possible to illuminate a surface with a proper tonality, which, in turn, can be acquired by means of a standard camera. It’s main use is to find thermal leaks in houses and buildings.
In their article, PLOTS‘ staff propose and describe a nice and cheap way to build your own thermal flashlight with Arduino, together with a clear introduction to the subject.
3D image input is often a challenging task when it comes to irregular objects like a human body. Here is where an arduino, tilt sensors and a little math comes to the rescue. University of Toronto’s Responsive Architecture at Daniels school created one such blanket.
The petals are made up of a conductive material, which are linked to larger network of conductive threads all in the shape of a hexagon. The loads of tilt sensors send the data of their position with respect to a central Arduino-powered computer which is then able to calculate the slopes between the various flowers and petals on the blanket. Thereby giving out a 3D input to the computer.
The concept will be widely applicable to interaction design, video game controls and numerous other fields.
A yet another reason to have arduino in your basic-electronic toolkit. You can build your own battery capacity measuring device. Now compare all the brands of the so claimed ‘long lasting batteries’. Know what you are buying!
Follow the instructions to build from here. and get building!
The Twittertape Machine prototype from Adam Vaughan connects to his Twitter account via Ethernet, checks for updates twice every minute, and prints out a hard copy of any new Tweets without the need for printer ink.
Vaughan told us that the idea for the Twittertape Machine was born of a desire to have the kind of old stock ticker seen in movies sitting on his desk. After a lukewarm reception to his pitch from friends, he decided to make his dream a reality. Rather than sacrifice a rare original (like the Edison Universal Stock Ticker used for Ames Bielenberg’s Spring Break project), he opted to build his own replica version from some old brass clock movements, a wooden plinth and a glass dome found online.
It is powered by two AC adapters and is controlled by a network-enabled Arduino-style microcontroller running custom code in the base. The board checks Vaughan’s Twitter account every 30 seconds for new Tweets.
The little thermal printer hidden at the base prints the tweets on a cut-down thermal paper. An awesome product in an awesome demand!
[Carlo Denaro] is sharing a smart solution to save digital pins while controlling an LCD, using Shift Register 74HC595. A simple yet useful project with skecth&libraries, datasheets and Fritzing schematics.
Like with many projects similar to this, an Arduino board controls pretty much everything. The floor is dominated by powerful LED lights, which respond to a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). A small computer is also inside (complete with Wi-fi), along with a car radio hooked up to speakers. Oh, and thanks to additional wheelchair motors, the floor can be wheeled away to wherever it’s needed.
Chris managed to build the dance floor in just one month, and documented how to do it on Instructables for anyone who wants to make their own. And now you’ve seen this, would you really want to throw a party without one?
TriggerTrap, is a very interesting product developed by Ziah Fogel & Haje Jan Kamps. Arduino-based & open-source, is now on preorder. What does it do? (Watch Video)
(With TriggerTrap) your camera will be easily controlled in a number of ways either by sound, by breaking a laser beam, time or any other method you can think of using its built in a Aux port.
TriggerTrap comes in the well designed, finished product and with the TT Shield (75$). More info soon.
Even if some of you (thanks for the wonderful picture, Bill) already realized it, we are officially announcing a big Christmas surprise for all Arduino users in North America: Radioshack sells Arduino in most of its 6000+ stores all around US!
This means that you’re going to find Arduino UNO, Arduino MEGA 2560 and Arduino ADK, together with four shields, in the main Radioshack stores in your homecity.
Arduino jumps into the retail market in its new *sexy* retail packaging developed by TODO.
We are asking you to celebrate this wonderful achievement by taking pictures of the Arduinos in the Radioshack nearby and twitt them with #Arduino@Radioshack hashtag.
Wonder if any of these new products (and retail packaging) will be sold on the Arduino Store? Stay tuned for next week Christmas’ Specials.
[Robotgrrl] shared a super-userful way to import Arduino Data to Mac applications, with tutorials and examples.
We created Matatino, a framework that lets you communicate between your Mac applications and your Arduino, You can follow our tutorials to get started with adding Matatino to your project. To see Matatino in action, check out Meters for Arduino. We will be adding more examples, libraries and tutorials for the Android ADK, iOS Redpark Serial Cable, Processing and OpenFrameworks in the future! You can stay informed about updates through RobotGrrl’s blog Apps4Arduino category feed.
